Damodaran on Resistance to Power as Depicted in the Hacker Wars

Saigopal AP Damodaran, Christ College, has published Resistance To Power as Depicted in the Hacker Wars at 7 IMPACT: International Journal of Research in Humanities, Arts and Literature 51 (June 2019). Here is the abstract.

The Hacker Wars(2014) is a documentary film directed by Vivien Lesnik Weisman. This documentary film focuses on hackers, specifically hacktivists and their battles against the US government over surveillance, privacy and who should hold information. The film tells the story of three prominent faces in the hacktivist movement. They are Andrew Aurenheimer, known by his hacker handle Weev, Barrett Brown, a journalist and propagandist for the hacker group, Anonymous and Jeremy Hammond who was known by his hacker handle, Anarchaos. There is the fourth character Sabu, a hacker who turned informant to the FBI and help nab these hackers. This paper will look at this documentary film and try to understand the way resistance to power is carried out in the cyberspace and what is the discourse these dissenters subscribe to and also briefly look at how these resistances are confronted. To do so, this paper will employ the ideas of Michel Foucault on power, discourse and resistance.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.